IBM is still going through a rough transition with declining revenues. Earlier this year, Rometty made the tough-but-necessary choice to abandon the company’s Roadmap 2015. That was a promise made by her predecessor to hit $US20 EPS by 2015. IBM was twisting itself into financial engineering pretzels to try and meet that promise.

That said, Rometty is making a lot of decisions that appear to be good for the company’s turn-around, like shedding low-margin or unprofitable businesses, investing billions in hot new areas like cloud computing, and signing on huge new partners like Apple, Twitter, Tencent.

A change in leadership right now would not be good, Bill Kreher, technology analyst for Edward Jones tells us. So we can understand why IBM’s board would entice her to stay. Still, the company’s annual layoff cycle and troubled financials have led to some poor moral among the Big Blue workforce, sources tell us. Rometty has got a low 48% per cent approval rating from employees who rated her on job-hunting site Glassdoor. So, her raise might not go over too well with everyone.